A system and method for searching, accessing, retrieving, representing and browsing geographic or location related information from the Web (i.e.: HTML documents that describe physical places), including a geographic distribution of places where selectable types of resources are located or certain types of services provided. A user may select any one of the automatically mapped locations and browse the information for this location. Documents accessible through the Web are tagged with the cartographic coordinates of the physical location referenced in the document and, optionally, with attributes of this physical location. Also provided is a method for searching and retrieving the tagged documents from a computer system by queries specifying parameters such as the cartographic coordinates of a reference location, the size of the geographic area to search around this reference location, and/or attributes of the locations to search inside that geographic area.